大象传媒

This event is presented by 大象传媒's David Lam Centre, Department of English, and Global Asia Program.

Scholarship in the nascent field of Indian Ocean cultural studies have trained their eyes on Africa and India but not quite the Malay Archipelago. Attempting to address this gap, this talk will explore the literary translation and rewriting of two related classical animal stories from the western parts of the Indian Ocean in its easternmost parts, the Malay Archipelago, as manifesting the Malayophone cosmopolis. These are Vishnu Sarma鈥檚鈥疨anchatantra鈥�(c. 200 BCE) which has been translated from Sanskrit to Bahasa as鈥疕ikayat Pancha Tanderan鈥�(1835) by Munshi Abdullah as well as Ibn al-Muqaffa鈥檚鈥疜alilah wa Dimnah(c. 700 CE) translated from Arabic to Bahasa by various translators in Malaysia and Indonesia in the twentieth century.鈥痀et why are these translations not constitutive of the more established notions of the Arabic (Ricci) or Sanskrit (Pollock) cosmopolis? The talk will respond to this question by drawing on two theoretical frameworks: Byung-Chul Han鈥檚 notion of 鈥榝uzhi鈥� or 鈥榗opies鈥� (2021) as well as the Global South concepts of the oceanic imaginary by Fijian author Subramani (2001) and its related notion of tidalectics by the Barbadian scholar Kamau Brathwaite (1995).鈥� 

Speaker Bios

Nazry Bahrawi

Nazry Bahrawi is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian literature and culture in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is an associate editor at the鈥疛ournal of Intercultural Studies, an鈥痚ditor-at-large at鈥疻asafiri鈥痬agazine and鈥痑 member of the editorial committee of鈥疉siatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature.